8 Easy Rules To Enhance Your Interview Lighting

Want some tips on how to make your interview lighting look better? Here are some rules on lighting and exposure that will help you out, as well as translate into many other aspects of filmmaking.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, but there are a few rules you should know so you don’t fail and make a complete mess. The same can be said with filmmaking. When it comes to interview lighting, setting up can be fairly easy – anyone and everyone does it nowadays, right? Making them look nice can be easy also; it just takes knowledge and practice.

Here are a few rules that will help you through that practice.

Ad

Work From The Broad Side

When considering framing for an interview, your image can be broken into two areas – the broad side and the short side. The broad side is where the negative space is. The short side is… the other, shorter side.

The rule of thumb is you should have your talent looking into the space across the broad side, with your key light also coming from this side. In a two-way conversation interview, placing the broad side for each subject on the opposite side from the other and looking into the space makes for a more natural flow of a scene, as it’s the most natural way in which a normal conversation would play out.

Lighting from the short side can lead to awkward and distracting nose shadows, and coming from the same angle as the camera can often look flat. Conversely, interview lighting from the broad side means you are primarily viewing the fill side of the subjects face – more interesting (more on that later) and more flattering .

Standard Interview With Broadside framing/lighting

Light From Up Stage

This is almost a continuation of lighting from the broad side, but stands itself as a rule as your framing starts to shift; a rule that is also translated in nearly every other shooting scenario. What is it? Let’s look at the interview lighting diagram below:

Working in a triangle like this means that, just like with rule number one, you’re shooting into the fill side of a subject’s face. This will not only add depth to your subject, but the whole scene. You are creating layers with your lighting, adding interest.

Up stage interview lighting (furthest cheek has more key)

If you were to light the above person downstage, or from the other cheek, you would lose shape and the shot would appear flatter as the light is coming from a similar direction to where the camera is pointing.

Backlight The Sun

The sun is the most powerful light we harness on our tiny world – fact. Trying to compete with it can be challenging.

When considering an interview that involves the sun – usually, but not limited to, exterior setups – using the sun as a backlight by orientating the camera and your talent can help in a few ways.

It’s More Flattering. Ever been outside and looked in the direction of the sun? You’re a human, so I’d hope so. As you know, it’s uncomfortable and you squint. Placing your talent so that the sun backlights them helps prevents this.

It Looks More Interesting. Placing the sun anywhere across the backline of your shooting scene will create interesting shapes to your scene/background. Trees will have shape to them, a light and a dark side.

Backlit sun casts interesting shadows across frame

Backlighting in combination with late or early shooting can give you interesting elongated shadows.

Shoot Into the Shadows

Rule 3 could have had a section on Having More Control, but a separate rule on shooting into the shadows covers that point, as well as other non sun-related scenarios.

Shooting into the shadows as a rule gives you control over your image, which is often most important when you have less budget, and therefore less control over your environment due to the amount of lighting you carry. However, this is a huge time saver that’s relevant for productions of all sizes.

How does it give you control? If your background is one of the darkest areas of your surroundings, it means you have more exposure to play with in terms of lighting more important aspects of your image, like your subject.

Example: you want to light an interview using natural light coming in through a window, you diffuse it with some grid cloth so the source is softer and more flattering to the subject.

By diffusing the window light you are also decreasing its level, meaning if there was an area in the background getting hit by direct window light, it will be overexposed in comparison to your subject.

Shooting into dark area of room made key light simple.

Shooting into the shadows in this scenario means picking a darker area of your background, one that is maybe not being hit directly by the window. You can therefore modify the natural key light without worrying about it being less bright than the background.

The same can be said about shooting into the shadows with artificial light – you don’t need it to work as hard in order to get to your desired exposure, so you can therefore use a less powerful source or add diffusion to increase the size of your source without worrying about level loss.

The Bigger The Key, The Better

There are many caveats to this rule, but speaking in terms of how flattering light can be on a subject, the bigger the light in relation to the subject, the better.

A bigger light wraps around your subject, it softens shadows and therefore has a more flattering aesthetic.

It will flatten the overall contrast, so there is a threshold before things look too flat, but generally a big, well-placed source will look lovely on skin. In practice, this can mean bouncing your small, high-powered LED light off some bounce rather than pointing it straight at your subject, or diffusing through a frame larger than your light fixture.

Knowing how much your grades/techniques of diffusion will reduce you fixture is key here, as every modification will reduce light level.

Expose From The One Aspect You Can’t Control

If you can’t control the light levels of a certain area of your image, this is where you should start with your exposure.

In a perfect world you would have control over all aspects of your image, but in cases where you can’t then you should expose to what you can’t control, and then light your other areas to match.

Exposed from the window first.

This could be a large window you can’t cut, or the general ambience levels because you can’t turn on or flag lights. Set your exposure levels so this area looks correct, and then bring in your lights to match this exposure level.

In smaller setups, using knowledge from other rules can help and save time here, for example by shooting into the shadows. If there’s a problematic window in the background that offers nothing to the story, frame it out!

Isolate Areas With Independent Control

Wherever possible, isolate your key, fill and background lights with independent sources. It’s often the case that you’ll be all setup and ready to go, when something changes last minute. The sun may come out from behind the clouds, or the client could suddenly want the the image to be less moody. If you have control of your key, fill and background independently, it means you can change things at the flick of a switch.

Having control is useful beyond being reactive to certain situations. It is also essential in work like greenscreen/colorama – you should completely isolate your subject and background to get optimum keying level, whilst lighting your subject appropriately, as well as flagging off the key light from the background so it doesn’t add level or cast shadows on the background.

Keep Light Levels In the Bank

Having isolated control doesn’t just mean having a dimmable light per aspect of your image. Sometimes your background level is lit with natural ambience, so how could you possibly have isolated control of this? Control is often found in the level of your exposure.

Using flexible fixtures for areas where you can control is the answer here (i.e a perfectly controllable key and fill light). You can then increase or decrease the key and fill, and match camera exposure to get the desired background level.

A tip here is to always expose with a stop more ND (Neutral Density) than you need. Then, if you need more level from the ambience of your background, just remove the ND and reduce your key and fill light by a stop, thus increasing the level of your background by one stop.

Lighting on the edge of all your fixtures and/or camera is problematic. If you have your key and fill lights on 100% and your camera exposed to it’s maximum (within your desired requirements), then you have nowhere to go if you need more level from your ambient background.

Learn Every Rule, Then Break Them

It’s a cliché in filmmaking, but there’s really no better medium where this theory applies best – the rules are there to be broken.

If you want to go for a silhouette scene, shooting into shadows may not apply.

I regularly frame interviews where the subject is looking short side (although I rarely see a short side-lit interview work; that dancing nose shadow is always distracting).

Interview from earlier but framed short side.

Sometimes you are forced to break the rules. Shooting multi-person interviews such as round-table discussions can be a nightmare for lighting up stage.

For every rule, you can find a hundred examples of where it wasn’t adhered to and things worked out successfully. The key to success is therefore to understand how and why a rule is there, and when it can be broken.

These are just a few interview lighting tips that have directly and indirectly helped me along the way. If you want to chime in and round this number up, please feel free to make your own suggestions for rules and tips in the comments below.

The biggest issue I face is trying to match shots in interviews where there are significant changes in ambient light coming from large windows. I rarely have control over the time of day of the shoot or enough resources/time to put up flags / ND on windows. The other thing is – as the sun begins to set, there is a shift in the colour spectrum, so I end up with golden/orange/red ambient light. Any ideas? Probably ought to take grey card readings and exposure every fresh take.

The other challenge I have is trying to achieve a consistent look/exposure ratio over the course of several interviews in a documentary. I’ve seen some amazing docs where the style and ratios are consistent (with subtle changes). Probably need a better location scout (that’s also me in most cases).

The second one is the easier answer – If you’re not already, I’d strongly suggest getting a light meter and take a key/fill/background reading on each setup.

This way you get an understanding of what ratio is working well for you for a certain look. This helps massively over long form projects; find a ratio that works and make sure every setup is the same by applying the same ratio per shoot.

In answer to your first question, it’s a tricky one to answer without a scenario in front of me, every shoot is different.

Using the above rules should get you there for the most of it. Another thing you could do is address it from a kit perspective. You may not have the resources to bring in a spark and/or hire big bulky modifiers, but you could start collecting compact solutions?

I have a a large selection of collapsible frames in house, from 6X4 to 3×2, it all fits into 2-3 bags; a little more to lug but makes the world of difference. In these smaller setups, you’ll find you can still control light levels by flagging stuff off.

Let me know if you’re interested and I can fire over some links for items.

Would definitely appreciate some links to collapsible frame suppliers (preferably in Europe) and a few recommendations. I suppose each frame requires its own light stand — so that means more equipment to carry and set up?

Scrim Jim kits are great, very light and you can make any combo of frame in 2′ sizes. I have 4X4 and 6X4 modifiers specifically for Scrim Jim, what came with both kits plus extra grades of diff. But then also have some standard butterfly 6X6 cloth options (grid cloths etc).

You can spec your own scrim jim kit if you want to start cheaper and build it up.

Yes, you need stands, the quickest way is to T bar them (stand up through the middle with a K clamp on the top – stand and crossbar make a T shape hence name). This is perfect for blackout, and if the light is soft enough, fine for diff too.

I haven’t found a lightweight collapsible frame system that is cheaper, that said I didn’t do a huge amount of shopping around. I invested quite early and just built up a Scrim Jim collection over the years.

Do let me know if you find an alternative!

That said,Scrim Jim is pretty modular, you can buy parts separately, so you can always buy small bits and build it up over time.

As mentioned, regular butterfly materials work on it also (it’s the interlocking frame that is unique), so if you find these cheaper you can always buy materials elsewhere; even common textiles like shower curtains.